Beatles' Let It Be (33 1/3) Read Online Free PDF Page A

anticipating the possible alienation of some of John’s young fans and their parents, refused to distribute the album. Instead, it was distributed by Chris Blackwell’s Island Records in the U.K. and by Tetragrammaton in the United States.
    To add to all the personal transformations in the group, the members also had to deal with the on-going business of Apple. As has been detailed at length in many other accounts of the Beatles, Apple had gone through severe growing pains up to that point.
    Apple Corps, as the entire company was called, officially began in January of 1968 and was originally located on the fourth floor at 95 Wigmore Street in London. Those offices were kept open for a short period after the business was moved to 3 Savile Road, sometime between July 15 and the autumn of 1968. The record division was launched in August of 1968.
    The closing of the Apple clothing boutique in the summer of 1968 and the ongoing struggle over who would actually manage the Beatles were overshadowed at the time by more vexing and immediate concerns. They included, first and foremost, the vast amount of money the group was spending, the large tax burden it was facing and the complete and total disarray of its financial records, some of which had just been lost while being transported to Apple’s new headquarters.
    Compounding the disparate concerns facing the group were the demands of various musical ventures. The Beatles had finished
The White Album
less than 10 weeks before, and in order to have it ready for sale in time for the Christmas holidays, they completed the mixing, the track selection, and the banding in one frenzied 24-hour session. The session began on October 16 at around 5 p.m. and did not end until the next day. Producer George Martin, engineers Ken Scott and John Henry Smith, and technical adviser Dave Harries joined John, Paul, and Ringo for the session. George Harrisonhad left for Los Angeles on the 16th to wrap up production on the Apple debut of Jackie Lomax, a former member of the Mersey Beat band the Undertakers. As a result of the frenzied work on
The White Album,
George’s production of the Lomax album, Paul’s work producing Mary Hopkin, and John’s involvement with various creative projects with Yoko, there was virtually no time left for the group to think about exactly what they were going to do at Twickenham.
    While John had expressed an interest in making an album without the overdubs and studio trickery of the past few years, which paralleled Paul’s concept of a live, back-to-basics approach, no real thought was given to which new songs the group was going to work on. As it turned out, the group would actually work through more than two complete albums’ worth of new Beatles material (
Let It Be
and
Abbey Road).
Also, the members of the group, especially George and Paul, would end up with a lot of material that they would later incorporate on solo albums.
    Twickenham Film Studios,
St. Margaret’s, The Barons,
Middlesex, England
    There’s a cold that comes on in the northern climates in early January. It’s a damp, penetrating cold oftenmade unbearable by a biting wind. A gray sameness that blurs the distinction between day and night often adds to the bleakness. It was on just such a cold, early winter morning that the Beatles found themselves on the second day of the new year, preparing not only to rehearse new songs, but to have their every waking moment filmed for the next several weeks. Having grown accustomed to playing live shows in the evening, and to recording primarily through the night, the Beatles were suddenly staring at banker’s hours.
    On Thursday, January 2, 1969, at Twickenham Film Studios, the Beatles began filming what were then described as rehearsals for an upcoming televised concert. The many buildings that comprise the small complex are in a rather inconspicuous area near St. Margaret’s Church and St. Margaret’s railway station. While seemingly far from the